Comment by hapticmonkey
13 hours ago
It’s not the technology I’m dismissive about. It’s the economics.
25 years ago I was optimistic about the internet, web sites, video streaming, online social systems. All of that. Look at what we have now. It was a fun ride until it all ended up “enshitified”. And it will happen to LLMs, too. Fool me once.
Some developer tools might survive in a useful state on subscriptions. But soon enough the whole A.I. economy will centralise into 2 or 3 major players extracting more and more revenue over time until everyone is sick of them. In fact, this process seems to be happening at a pretty high speed.
Once the users are captured, they’ll orient the ad-spend market around themselves. And then they’ll start taking advantage of the advertisers.
I really hope it doesn’t turn out this way. But it’s hard to be optimistic.
Contrary to the case for the internet, there is a way out, however - if local, open-source LLMs get good. I really hope they do, because enshittification does seem unavoidable if we depend on commercial offerings.
Well the "solution" for that will be the GPU vendors focusing solely on B2B sales because it's more profitable, therefore keeping GPUs out of the hands of average consumers. There's leaks suggesting that nVidia will gradually hike the prices of their 5090 cards from $2000 to $5000 due to RAM price increases ( https://wccftech.com/geforce-rtx-5090-prices-to-soar-to-5000... ). At that point, why even bother with the R&D for newer consumer cards when you know that barely anyone will be able to afford them?